We speak to daring design trio EOOS about bathrooms, beauty and their creative process

Eoos are formed by talented Austrian designers, Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann and Harald Grundl, who have set the standard when it comes to practical yet super stylish design. Their clever creations include the recently launched Shower + Bath sets for Duravit, designed with smaller spaces in mind. The two in one walk-in shower and bathtub features an integrated glass door which transforms the bathtub into an accessible open shower. If the door is opened towards the inside of the bathtub, it disappears under a waterproof cushion and remains invisible. The firm cushion is positioned on the integrated door and the edge of the bathtub, offering a comfortable seat and additional shelf space. Other EOOS designed products for Duravit include the Paiova 5 bathtub, the Stonetto shower tray, and the OpenSpace B shower enclosure.

Who did you have in mind when you were designing the Shower + Bath and how did you start the design process?

Many years ago we started to think about room efficiency in growing cities, focusing on decreasing floor space and bathroom sizes. Shower + Bath is a transformable multi-functional object – when used as a shower the door to the bathtub vanishes completely under a stool. It doesn’t appear to be a bathtub as such, rather a walk-in shower with a seat and a whole-body mirror. When closing the door it becomes a bathtub – so a tub only when needed.

Your Shower + Bath designhas succeeded in uniting contemporary bathroom design with optimum use of space, how did you come up with such an innovative design and did you face any challenges?

Very few of us have the spacious, luxurious bathrooms portrayed on the TV and in the glossy magazine adverts and this is why we considered ways of combining size and space efficiency. This led us to OpenSpace and the new OpenSpace B. With OpenSpace the shower cubicle is where you need it and it simply disappears when not in use. OpenSpace allows you to treat yourself to a more spacious shower cubicle in a small bathroom, because you can simply fold it away when not in use. This may seem obvious, but at the same time this radical notion can noticeably alter the look and feel of a bathroom. The modern bathroom can be a haphazardly filled space crammed with dozens of products and objects, all of which are useful, but have a tendency to make the room look very busy. Hiding the shower fittings, shampoos and soaps was the concept behind OpenSpace and we feel this makes the bathroom a more tranquil, relaxing space.

Tell us about the creative process that has brought about someof these innovative designs?

In our opinion, the first thing a designer should do when designing a bathtub is take a bath! How can you assess the quality of a bathtub if you’ve never bathed in it? For this reason we build laminated full-scale models of our designs in our studio in which all three of us lie in it to test them. Further on in the design process, prototypes are built by Duravit in which the entire design team can try it out too! When we were developing Palova 5, we tested over half a dozen prototypes until we found the ideal shape.

The fact that Duravit supports and accompanies us in this is proof of the company’s high standards.

Quality and sustainability are very important to EOOS, canyou tell us more about this?

In the future, we need to design the whole life cycle of a product, not only the product itself. We have to consider the impact the product has on the environment in terms of water and energy usage. We need to understand how we can avoid leaving a large environmental footprint. More and more products have a certificated life cycle analysis (Environmental Product Declaration) which leads to more transparency and can be used as benchmark to comparable products. As a team, we need to make informed design decisions and take responsibility for the future.

How do you see thebathroom of the future?

For the future, we want to create a good balance between traditional thinking combined with the use of the latest technology.

Can you tell me what youare working on next?

We are fascinated by projects with the themes of transformation, rituals and collective images. We concentrate on what we call the authentic objects. Objects, which do not need to represent something else, but just be themselves. The material is the real material, the poetry is the real poetry, the construction is the real construction, nothing is hidden from view and we try to take care of the entire product.